My Buster Keaton shot length data is now available on Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
This data set comprises shot length data for 31 Buster Keaton short films released between 1917 and 1923 from the Masters of Cinema DVD release Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films, 1917-1923 (Eureka Entertainment Ltd). This DVD set also includes the known footage for Moonshine (1918), but as there is only six minutes of poor quality footage available this film has not been included in the data set.
The data set covers Keaton’s work for the Comique Film Company, first as with for Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and then as writer and director of his own films. Later films in the sample were produced by Keaton’s own company, Buster Keaton Productions.
The data set includes 32 CSV files. The file 1917-1923 Buster Keaton Short Film Credits.csv contains the details of each film including Title, Production Company, Release Date, Length in reels, Producer, Director(s), Writer(s), Cinematographer(s), Editor, and the URL of the relevant IMDB page. Where these details are unknown they are marked with question marks (?). Buster Keaton is listed as editor on all his films as it is generally accepted he edited his own films (with the assistance of Sherman Kell), though this information is not normally recorded in filmographies of Keaton’s work.
There is a CSV for each of the 31 films, and each file has the same structure containing four columns of data: shot number, shot length, cumulative running time, and shot type (title or action). Shots are identified as belonging to two types: either action shots or titles, which includes credits and intertitles. It appears many of the films In the sample have had new title cards produced during restoration, though some appear to have their original titles intact.
All shot length data has been converted to 24 frames per second.
Data was collected using Davinci Resolve 16.2.3015 Auto Scene Detection and then corrected by hand.
To cite this data set:
Redfern, N. (2020). Buster Keaton Short Film Shot Length Data (Version 1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3924195.
Computational Film Analysis 
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